


The Ledge

by elo_elo



Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Angst, Corruption, Crime lords with soft centers, Developing Friendships, F/M, Falling In Love, Hurt/Comfort, I'm Bad At Tagging, Just in general, Mystery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Redemption, Reluctant Heroes, Renegade Ryder, Rough Sex, Ryder fucks Liam, Ryder fucks Peebee, Slow Burn, Smut, learning to live with the ai in your head, like everyone else - Freeform, romantically, they fuck pretty quick, you know
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:41:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23174107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elo_elo/pseuds/elo_elo
Summary: Lana Ryder left Omega with blood on her hands and red sand coursing through her veins. A new galaxy is her only hope for survival even if it comes at the price of renewed contact with her long-estranged father. She'd planned to run as soon as they hit Andromeda. Disappearing is always what she's done best, after all. But when they pull her battered body off Habitat 7, her father's corpse stiff beside her, it quickly becomes clear that disappearing isn't something she's going to be able to do and Lana soon finds that the Initiative too is full of dark secrets.
Relationships: Female Ryder | Sara/Reyes Vidal
Comments: 10
Kudos: 24





	1. Chapter 1

i was born among the stars / i was born in a basement / i was born miles

beneath the ocean / i am part machine / part starfish / part citrus / part girl /

part poltergeist /

sometimes / when the sidewalk / opens my knee / i think / please / please let me /

remember this

Franny Choi, _Soft Science_

Lana can still feel the bruises sometimes. Livid and dark. Purple in the right light. Like the asari who gave them to her.

`The Tempest heaves quietly, just the barest movement, the only sign in the otherwise still ship that Kallo is taking them up to FTL. Lana pulls her hair up, ties it off, fingers slipping unconsciously behind her left ear. A raised scar the size of her thumbprint, a warped burn. A special parting gift.

She’d tried to kill her. Which was, in Aria’s way, a compliment. A show of respect. On Omega, Patriarch’s fate was one worse than death. And Lana feels, sometimes, like a liminal thing. Not dead, not quite alive. The vast nothingness outside her window deepens the feeling. Clusters of darkness, of angry stars. _We shouldn’t be here._

If she closes her eyes, she can feel the crackle of Aria’s biotics, can still hear her own screams echoing the walls of Afterlife. The FTL drives kick up, brief vertigo washing over her, then just as quickly receding. Lana kneads a sore spot at the base of her neck, thankful for the distraction. Sleep isn’t coming, no matter how exhausted she is, how worn down. They say she was in a coma for three days. They say her heart gave out twice. She thinks, maybe, her body is afraid. Afraid that if it lets its guard down for even a moment, death will overtake it again. Vertigo washes over Lana and this time it isn’t FTL kickback.

She feels a twitch in her brain and frowns. Lana can feel it watching, the robot they put in her head, wonders if her thoughts look like lines of code to it or if they have musculature; wonders if her thoughts are in a language it can understand or if, like a well-trained dog, it’s just mimicking what her father taught it. That twitch again. She can almost feel it wanting to correct her. She tries to keep her thoughts quiet. But they’re racing even if she can’t make out what they say. Her brain is shooting blanks. _Pathfinder._ She goes rigid at the sound. When it speaks out loud, the sound echoes a little in her head. It stopped speaking just to her, just inside her head, a day ago. Something about her heart rate, her blood pressure. It speaks out loud now, or not at all. _Six hours of sleep is the advised minimum for a woman of your age. You are expected on the bridge in seven._ She ignores it, wonders if maybe she can will it into silence with her own.

 _Fuck._ What a fitting parting gift her father gave her. Her last, quietest refuge blown wide open. His hands kneading through her most private thoughts even beyond the grave. It’s more than that too. Those last moments when he’d cradled her head, his own oxygen pressed tightly to her face. An umbilical cord. His sacrifice another jab. A tenderness she’d never once seen in all her life **.** _Where was this? Where was this when I needed it?_ Lana takes her hair down; she grabs her towel. The soft swish of recycled air washes over her as she heads out into the hall.

This always happens with mirrors. At least after she left Omega. A slippage. Where she doesn’t recognize herself at first. Where she expects to see something worse than she does. The miracles of modern medicine. Just a few scars, no bruises.

The crew showers are like a mirror, that cold metal reflecting her back to herself a hundred times over. Distorted and watery. Six hundred years asleep and it still feels like yesterday when all her ribs were broken, when she was frothing up blood in the cargo hold of that transport. Her fever spiking, veins burning up, ships going to pieces all around her. Her gasp echoes threefold in the empty room. These thoughts are still so intense. She leans heavily on her forearms, pressing her head to the metal, letting it cool her down. When she opens her eyes, she flinches. The steam rises up, obscuring everything, and she exhales, welcoming it.

Maybe this is how grief is going to be. Her brain seeking anything that isn’t her father. The dead man with the same eyes she sees every morning in the mirror. Those eyes that had watched her so intently on Illium. Assessing her after so many years apart. He had, apparently, been impressed with what he’d seen. She wouldn’t be here otherwise. Her father’s praise always came with a price. Sometimes the weight of his face makes it hard to breathe. The water shuts off. The room suddenly cavernously quiet. Just the drip, drip, drip of water from her hair. Lana takes a deep, long breath. The thing in her head twitches.

As she towels herself off, Lana tries to remember how old Aria was when she finally built up the courage to flee. More than a thousand. She’s almost sure. How long can asari even live? She wonders, as she examines herself clinically in the mirror, if Aria might be dead now. Finally. Lana tweezes a few stray hairs from her brow. Can a person like that that really die? There were times, standing beside her on the dais in Afterlife, when Lana was sure that Aria would live forever. Preserved by spite, by rage. Lana works a comb through the tangles in her dark hair and tries to figure out if the idea of the asari’s vengeful spirit scares her. Or if it’s scarier to think that the scion of Omega wouldn’t choose her to haunt. Death or obscurity. So many years under Aria’s thumb and she still doesn’t know which frightens her more. Or maybe that’s just something she got from her father.

Lana digs for her nail file in her toiletry bag, settles on the rim of the toilet once she finds it and starts to shape her nails. Cora gave her shit when they were bunking up back on the Traverse station before launch. _Awful prissy for a military brat._ The jab had barely registered. Lana would pour all her energy into her appearance if she had the time. It’s her first trick, her first line of defense. The most vulnerable and dangerous thing about her. She’d learned that long before she first landed on Omega. The thought makes her feel brutal and she slips with the file, pricking the skin around her thumb with its sharp edge. She feels the thing in her hear squirm, wonders suddenly if it can feel the pain. She rocks a little back, examining the blood trickling down her finger. Is it the same translated into lines of code or does the concept of pain gets lost in the algorithm, broken down into abstract pieces. Aria was like that. Good at breaking things down into pieces so small and unrecognizable that you could barely understand what was happening until it had already happened. Like a frog in a pot, boiled before it even tries to escape. Lana’s grandmother used to say shit like that. Back on Earth. Lana shakes her head, gets back to filing, quickly running over another tender spot, breaking one of her nails. They both wince. 

Her first impulse is to apologize to it, like she would to a roommate, but she bites it back. She rips off the hangnail and tosses it into the trash, tries not to let the whirr of its disposal unnerve her. She’s never lived on a ship this small and all the little reminders of its ecosystem send her brain spinning until all she can think about is the bottomless drop beneath them, how up and down have no meaning this deep in space and with even the smallest shift the Tempest might lose its tenuous mooring, go spinning into nothing. The idea of a crash is less terrifying. At least impact is definitive. The smell of blood and fuel and burning wire. The thought of twisting slowly, endlessly through deep space ignites a quiet panic in her. She looks back up at herself in the mirror. She can feel the thing in her head twist. Worry, maybe, if machines can worry. She can feel her heart pounding, a cold numbness in the tips of her fingers. But her reflection is the same as always. Placid, just the slightest smile at one corner of her mouth. Aria didn’t teach her how to hide in plain sight, but she helped Lana refine it. “Fuck Aria.” Her voice echoes wetly in the room. She packs up her toiletries. She leaves.

Lana takes a long swig of water, stands again in front of the window. She doesn’t know any of the names of the stars and nebulas that stretch out in front of her. Though someone surely does. Not that anyone will ask them. They’d carved up and named this place back in the Milky Way long before Lana even knew it existed. The Nexus has become good at pretending that what they’re doing isn’t an invasion. Even if they haven’t found anything yet to invade. Even if they’re just limping along, grateful to sap up reserve power while thousands of human colonists sleep through it. 

The faint glow of the scourge hums at her peripheries. She thought it was beautiful on that ride down to habitat 7. All glistening, glimmering rage. Like barbed wire, like the thorny stems of roses. _We shouldn’t be here._

She’s got a picture of Scott on her bedside table. An honest to god film print that’s gone with her so many places it’s torn at the edges, white where the places she’s folded it have removed the film. Lana picks it up, runs her thumb along the glossy surface, thinned out by all the times she’s done just that.

It’s the two of them. At fifteen. Six months before she ran off and when she looks at it now, she can see the panic settled deep in her eyes, the tension in her jaw. But she’s still smiling. Scott too. But his is real. Bright and toothy, that little gap between his front two always so charming. They’re standing just outside the Presidium, leaning up against the railing, the fountain at their backs. Dressed in their school uniforms, they look like a strange mirror. They have the same round mouth, the same ski slope nose. Scott’s hair is a little ruddier, a little more like their father’s. Lana inherited her mother’s thick, inky locks. But they’ve got the same deep, blue eyes. _Soulful,_ her mother used to say. Lana just thinks they look sullen.

Even the way they’re standing is like a mirror. Both of them with one foot tucked behind the other, their hands hanging onto the railing behind their backs. Scott’s about twice her size in the photo. Nearly a head and half taller and just as wide. He’s always been big, even when he was young before he started juicing at the behest of their father. She fits neatly in his shadow.

They’re glancing at each other in the photo, something unspoken passing between them. That thin line of energy always connecting them. A lump settles in Lana’s throat. She puts the photo down and looks back out at the scourge. It pulses, like it knows she’s watching.

There’s a framed photograph of her father too, though she can’t remember putting it there. Probably Cora did. A misguided attempt to comfort her, an assumption of shared hero worship. Because how could she, Alec Ryder’s only daughter, not adore him? Lana didn’t dare ask what Cora knew, what her father told her. _He was a piece of shit,_ she’d wanted to hiss at Cora when the woman collapsed in the ship’s hydroponics only a few hours ago, so full of rage and grief that it had boiled over, cracked her normally ironclad composure. But Lana found herself balking in the face of her father’s betrayal of Cora. How awful that must have been. How fucking confusing. Just another bad thing in a whole ocean of bad, disorienting thing. And so, she’d just laid her hand on Cora’s back. _I’m so sorry,_ she’d said, _I’m so, so sorry._

Lana glances back down at the photograph. It's him in his dress blues, looking thoughtfully out of frame, the background a wash of stars. Lana isn't sure he has any candid photos. Not any that she’s seen anyway. His fellow soldiers must have taken some. The only time she’d ever seen her father even approach personable is when his fellow N7’s would come over to their apartment on the Citadel. But she and Scott would be rushed quickly to their rooms, only getting whatever snippets of conversation they could make out with their ears pressed to the crack in the door.

Some of his lovers probably took photos of him too though the idea fills her with revulsion. She remembers, just barely, the sound of another woman breathless around her father’s name, remembers pressing her hands to her ears, staring hard at the ceiling, remembers Scott turning his music up so loudly it slipped out of his headphones and into the room. Christ, her poor, long suffering mother. A titan in her own right brought so easily to her knees by him. So hopelessly, terribly in love that she’d let him limp her towards death, humoring his every painful, prolonged attempt to keep her alive when her body had already given out.

He was a man who loved to play god. The thing in her head twitches when she thinks that. She feels a tinge of pity for it. _Sam._ Such a harmless, friendly name. It didn’t ask for this either **.**

Lana looks back out her window. The particular strand of scourge they’ve been following is closer now. Light pulses down it, then fades away until the strand looks just like a smoldering ember. She wonders if it would be hot to the touch. _Try and see,_ her father might say. Fearless or sadistic, she had never been sure. Would never be sure now.

Lana lets her towel slip to the ground, pads naked to the bed in the middle of the room. Never slept in. That’s some consolation, to not be sleeping in a dead man’s bed. She arranges her blankets around her like a little nest. Like walls, close but not touching her. She used to do this as a child when the Citadel would get too busy, when her head would get too busy. Surrounded and alone. Lana hears voices in the hall, coming out from the mess, disappearing down toward the armory. Surrounded and alone.

She’s said something to the crew before the ship launched. A sea of unfamiliar faces and she felt like a kid giving a presentation she hadn’t prepared for. She’d chirped, her voice almost unrecognizable, smiled in a way that made her cheeks hurt. She regurgitated everything she could remember about the Nexus, the Initiative. _We’ll make a difference. We’ll bring hope_. She’d had to be a lot of things on Omega but never cheery. It fit strangely on her shoulders. Lana hopes that her performance was convincing, that there is at least someone on this godforsaken ship that feels like whatever they’ve got to do, they’ll be able to. Lana only feels a steadily escalating dread.

There was a moment, before cryo, when a bolt of pure, painful panic shot through her. When she’d tried to imagine 600 years, the full scope of it. When she’d taken a breath and realized that it was one of the last she’d take in the Milky Way. Terror crashed over her and she’d nearly scrambled from the cryo pod. Fuck Aria, fuck running, fuck the whole goddamn Andromeda Initiative. But Scott had reached over, his hand quietly, firmly holding hers. _I’ll go first,_ he’d said. Then with a wink, _just like when we were born._

That panic washes over her again, laying alone here in a bed that was never supposed to be hers. And this time she really is alone. Scott’s out like a light. Practically dead. Her father probably would have preferred it the other way around. She might have preferred it the other way around too. In the Milky Way there were always places to run to. Always another city to go to, another self to slip into. She could always fall into the shadows, could always start over. Here it’s just the ship. And there’s nowhere to hide on the ship. Lana drums her fingers on her chest, trying to calm her stuttering heart.

She wonders, sucking in a ragged breath, if Scott is dreaming. Wonders what his dreams are like. He never had nightmares as a kid. She got all of his.

The knock on the door is so quiet she doesn’t hear it. But the thing in her head does and it tells her in that quiet, artificial voice that someone is there. It calls her pathfinder again. The word makes her bristle.

Lana gets up from the bed, wiping at her eyes. She’d fallen into a strange half-sleep. Enough to make her feel disoriented, but not enough to feel like rest.

She pulls on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and heads to the door to find Liam practically bouncing on his toes outside. Pretty, peppy Liam. Liam who’d been the first to greet her when they thawed her out. _We met before cryo. Do you remember?_ She hadn’t. He’d forgiven her.

He’s all smiles and gesticulating as he talks. "Lana." Her name sounds soft in his mouth. He says it like he's never heard a name like that before. “A movie,” he says, “why don’t we watch a movie?”

She wavers at the door, but finds that she doesn’t have the words to refuse him and steps aside to let him in. She’s always had a weakness for naivete. And for liquor. He brings both. Sits down on her bed but doesn’t seem to realize that he’s done it, doesn’t seem to realize the implication of it. His smile is bright, eyes glittering. He doesn’t reach across to try and touch her when she sits down beside him and maybe it’s just another foreign thing that she’ll have to get used to. One of many.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	2. Chapter 2

“Relax,” Kian says as he hands him a whiskey. And there’s something about the way he says it, maybe just about the word itself, that reminds Reyes of the one and only time they fucked. It had been during those first parched weeks on Kadara, when Kian had first started to turn this dank warehouse into the only slightly less dank club where they’re standing now. _Unlucky name,_ Reyes said to him. The first thing he ever said to him. Because it was a daring thing to name a club on a place like Kadara after a place in hell. Reyes doesn’t remember what Kian said back to that, just remembers the way he’d grinned, raising a single flirtatious eyebrow. Remembers how hard Kian had to work him with his fingers that night, how wildly, horribly painful that first thrust had been.

It’s easy to pretend to be relaxed. Harder to make your body believe it. Kian, that night, learned the whole depth of Reyes’ deep, rigid anxiety. And he never forgot it. That’s why Reyes doesn’t let men fuck him on Kadara anymore. Kian refills his glass. “You look like you’re going to pop a vessel, my friend.”

Reyes takes a long pull of the whiskey, then checks his omnitool. No word from Keema. She was supposed to get in contact at 0100 hours. It’s almost two in the morning. He takes another long pull. “Don’t blow my cover, huevón” He glances back at Kian, winks at him. “You get me killed, you’re gonna have to find someone else to pay half the rent eh?” Kian scoffs, heading back toward the makeshift taps. Reyes scans the room. It’s still hard for him to tell angara apart. Keema, he knows, but the others meld together. It rankles him, this clear point of weakness.

A turian with a missing mandible sidles up to the bar. Reyes gives him a hard once over before returning to his drink. He checks his omnitool again. A tickertape of messages, some for him, some routed through Outcast channels. None of them from Keema. Kian slides a glass across the bar, the sound of metal against metal. Reyes catches a whiff of something sharp as motor oil. “So,” Kian sticks his head out of the bar’s cage, leaning on his forearms, “what’s on the menu tonight.”

Reyes laughs, a little bitterly, swirling the whiskey in his cup. Military grade metal doesn’t quite have the same effect as glass, but the liquor still bites and that’s all he cares about tonight. Reyes surveys the club again. Neon slides over the bodies of dancers, color bisected by the shadows of the bars. And then, standing at the far end, her armor glinting in the low light, he sees her. Zia. Two days early back to Port. Looking more riled up than he’s used to. Reyes pushes himself off the bar and finishes his drink. Zia is, at worst, a passable distraction. At best, he might be able to get some off-planet gossip out of her, trying to figure out what’s got her going, what brought her back to port early. A pulse of neon light falls over her face. Kian chuckles, cleaning out one of the cups with a dingy rag. “Ah, so suffering’s on the menu tonight then.”

Zia likes to run the show. Demanding, fussy, bordering sometimes on violence. She refuses, categorically, to let him set the pace. Tonight, is no exception. Zia hates foreplay. That should have been his first hint that they were, clearly, _obviously_ poorly matched. Reyes has always like a slow build, always liked the to tease. Shit like that doesn’t matter in Andromeda though. At least not on Kadara. And tonight, she’s in a hell of a mood. He’s barely started fucking her before she’s scratching at him like a cat, leaving claw marks in her wake so deep and brutal Reyes knows he’ll be feeling them for days. She growls in his ear, bouncing on him like a wild animal. She’d slapped him the first time they fucked, hard across his cheek. It’s not usually what Reyes’ likes. But nothing on Kadara has been about what Reyes likes, what he wants. He’s grown into a man who more often than not, when he catches his reflection in the butt of his gun, on the metallic walls of Draullir, doesn’t recognize himself. He keeps his Alliance dog tags around his neck, touches them sometimes, like a good luck charm, a reminder, of the man he used to be. Zia yanks him up by them, his hands steadying himself on her hips. She rakes her fingers through her hair, tits bouncing in time with his thrusts. He wanted her at first because she was ferocious, unafraid. That first moment he saw her, red hair glinting in Kadara’s overbright sun, the dust kicked up by the shuttles’ landing still swirling in the air. He wants her now because he’s lonely. She makes him feel lonelier.

When she feels particularly generous, she’ll take his balls in her mouth. It is, as far as he can tell, the only gentle thing she does. And sometimes he feels like he could love her for that, the way she can make him cum. But tonight, she’s ignored his balls save for when she’d nudged them a little too hard before straddling him. It seems like they’re both in a mood tonight.

Zia’s narrow but muscular. A soldier’s body. A fighter’s body. They feel well-matched in that, at least. Perhaps the only thing they’re well-matched in. She wraps her long fingers around his neck and he’s so strung out with anxiety, so goddamn keyed up about Keema, that he lets her. Let’s her squeeze until his vision frizzles on the edges. He can feel the grooves of her callouses, all the places where a gun touches.

It takes him longer than it should to upend her, to pull her off him and toss her onto the couch beside him. Reyes kneads at his neck. “Hermosa, please, what is with you?”

She waves him off, tension rolling off her in waves, but she looks a little more settled than she had even a moment before. It’s always give and take with them. So he lets her rolls back on top, lets her lip back down onto hi.. His cock, he’s learned these months on Kadara, tends to go with the flow. Zia steadies herself on his shoulders, nails digging in his skin. “You piss me off.” She rocks against him, nails digging in deeper. Reyes lets his head fall back, a low groan escaping his mouth.

He rolls his head forward, thumbing at her clit, then pulls her closer, nipping at a sensitive spot just above her collarbone. She moans, softening her hold on him. He tightens his fingers on her hips. “What do you want from me, huh, nena?”

Zia squirms in his grip, her fiery hair stuck messily to her neck. “I want you to shut up and fuck me, Reyes.” Reyes chuckles, digs his fingers in deeper. Skin slaps against skin as he thrusts hard up into her, but soon, and predictably, Zia pushes him hard back against the couch, starts to grind to her own tempo. And Reyes lets her. Because that deep fatigue that lives in his bones all the time now, just waiting under the surface, washes over him. He lets his eyes close and soon Tartarus falls away. Zia flickers then fades and all he can see is the screen of his omnnitool. Pinging a long line of messages. He can smell the metallic scent of blood mixing unevenly with sulfur, with smoke. Zia rocks hard against him and the movement echoes that first crash onto the planet, intrusive now in his thoughts. He’d been rattled so hard against his harness, there’d been bruises across his chest that hadn’t faded for weeks. He has a faint scar just above his cheekbone from where the shattering glass scattered across everyone inside. A deceleration, a crash, and then nothing but the smell of sulfur. Zia slaps him.

The room goes incredibly still. His mind blank. He opens his eyes. Zia has stilled too. He can see the fear plain on her face, like maybe this time she’s gone too far. Like maybe those rumors that Reyes can’t quite get to stop circulating about a violent temper, buried deep under that amiable, charming surface are about to come true. He can’t have that, no matter how badly he wants to. So Reyes cups her face, feigns a tenderness he doesn’t really feel, running his thumb along her lip. “Why are you acting like such an animal tonight, Zia?”

She says nothing, trying her teeth on his thumb. Her kiss is bruising, hips pistoning now again down onto him. They are strangers, he knows, and becoming more and more unfamiliar with each passing moment.

He holds her waist when he cums, running his blunt nails down her sides, tracing each muscle on her body. A familiar body. His to her too, he imagines. Too familiar, Reyes decides, when Zia sneers at him after her own orgasm. They’ve been fucking for too long. “Ease up, will you?” Zia rolls off him, staggering to her feet.

“Ease up on what?” Reyes laughs, rubbing the tender spot on his shoulder where she’d dug her nails in. “You’re the one who needs to ease up.” He glances over at the shipping crate Kian’s tried to turn into an end table, reaches over for the bottle of whatever swill Kian’s sent up.

“Smuggling.”

Reyes scoffs, looking back so quickly he doesn’t have time to school his look of incredulity. “Did you forget that’s my job, nena?”

He watches Zia dress, clicking her armor back on piece by piece. She brushes her hand protectively over a long scar curving around her hip, an impulse Reyes is sure she doesn’t even realize she’s acting on. Asari huntress somewhere in the Horsehair Nebula if he remembers right. She’d told him the story once, back when they still talked about themselves, when they did more than fuck. She looks over her shoulder at him. “You’re talking all the big jobs off-world, Reyes. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

He winks before taking a swig from the bottle, then grimaces. It goes down like ryncol. “Can’t help it if I’m good at my job. Zia.”

“You’re a greedy shit,” she snaps back, the air pulsing between them.

“This isn’t a charity I’m running here.” She scoffs, makes for the door. He waves the bottle toward her. “Nothing to drink?”

“I wouldn’t drink with you if you were the last man in Andromeda.” The jab rolls off his back. He chuckles, taking another swig from the bottle. She rolls her eyes, but he can see that something in her expression has softened, her shoulders a little looser. “See you around, Reyes.”

When the door to his room swishes closed, every ounce of tension he’d managed to work out fucking Zia washes over him again. Reyes leans forward, head hanging, hands fisted in his hair. It’s been a long fucking week and with Sloane ramping up security around the docks, it’s looking to be turning into an even longer one. He sits up rigid at the sound of his omnitool pinging, brushing aside two security feeds he keeps on a constant stream. Reyes frowns he sees it isn’t from Keema, but instead a message from Evfra. He fights the urge to send the bottle crashing into the wall. Reyes kneads his temples and takes another drink.

It’s nearly four am now. Reyes can hear the club winding down from outside his door, hear Kian shouting down below. If something has happened to Keema, he’s compromised. And if he’s compromised…the next notification nearly sends him rocketing out of his seat. It’s Keema, finally, and every muscle in his body unclenches.

_tulus talked. body in pit two. five outcast supply drops. pinging you lat/long. new guard schedule._

Reyes exhales. Then he leans forward, trying to roll out a kink in his neck. He brought his grandmother’s rosary with him through cryo, one of the few things. Carried it for six hundred years in the pocket of his pants. He keeps them there still, always within reach. Some nights he’ll roll the beads between his fingers, trying to soothe the guilt he can’t seem to get out from under. For everything. Tonight, he just pours himself another drink and tires to feel again like Reyes the pilot, like Reyes the smuggler. Like whatever the Charlatan is supposed to be. He doesn’t feel like any of those things tonight. Just feels like hell. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading <3


	3. Chapter 3

Lana watches the Nexus come into view from the helm. She finds herself standing at parade rest. There’s something about the room that seems to demand it, but when she catches her reflection in the glass, she looks so much like an echo of her father that her heart leaps into her throat. She shakes it out, slumps her shoulders. Kallo glances over at her, then quickly back to the bridge.

The Tempest drifts left, skirting along a branch of the scourge. The whirring feels more pronounced up here at the helm than it does in her cabin and Lana tries not to let it spook her. She’d dreamt all night of the abyss; can feel it all around the ship. She tries not to think about falling, tries to remember that the stations where she grew up were just as adrift in space as she is now. Lana hears the metallic sound of Vetra’s talons behind her, glances over her shoulder to see her approaching. She raises an eyebrow in greeting, Vetra flutters her mandibles. Cora appears in the doorway, after a moment of consideration, hangs back by the escape pods. Kallo’s fingers flutter over the controls. “This is the Tempest requesting permission to dock.” The ship banks another hard left and Lana turns back to the look at the station. The comm crackles. Lana feels the ship dip in altitude, the station coming into clearer view.

It’s massive. A rickety, scarecrow-like double for the Citadel. And it’s limping. That much she can see from space. They’re still drifting left to dock because only the left side is lit, the rest just darkness, a burnt, dead absence. Lana glances over to the docking bay. It’s flickering. Power surging from the Hyperion like a vein. She watches the power flow into the Nexus, watches it fizzle at the far end. The hulking wing flickers in time with the loop of scourge that has edged up to the station. Suvi gasps; the robot in Lana’s head twitches. They’re similar, Lana thinks before quickly correcting herself. There’s nothing to compare. “Fascinating,” Suvi says, then looks up sheepishly, owl eyes blinking too quickly. “Dr. Aridana thinks they may be close to untangling the source of it. Once we do that, we have a real shot at getting rid of it entirely.” Lana scrunches up her face, realizes with a sort of dull horror that she’s not sure she wants the scourge gone. That it feels…right weaving through this unknown galaxy, this nightmare away from home. “It’ll be safer to fly.” Lana glances down and nods. Suvi seems, perhaps as some personal favor to Dr. T’Perro, deeply invested in trying to comfort Lana. She isn’t very good at it.

 _God is in the details,_ she’d told Lana once over an awkward cup of tea, _you just need to look for the patterns_. Oddly poetic for a scientist. She can’t even remember what prompted it now. Lana had opened her mouth to argue. _God is enormous,_ she’d wanted to say, _God is the long, sleek lines of the Citadel, the curve of Omega’s whirling mushroom top._ She’d reached up to run her fingertips over the scar behind her ear. _The devil is in the details._

Vetra makes that metallic purring sound in her throat as the Tempest starts to descend. The drop in altitude makes Lana’s insides flip and Vetra makes the noise again. It reminds her of the cat her neighbor had on the Citadel, of the comforting hum of the ramen shop’s ventilator under her apartment on Omega. Lana’s heart settles back in her chest.

It’s a relief that Tann doesn’t want to speak with her. That he gives her only a single dismissive glance before disappearing down the stairs and back into his office. Their first meeting had gone, on paper, well. But Lana knows her naïve little girl act hadn’t fooled the salarian, just like his magnanimous welcome hadn’t fooled her. There’s something decidedly sinister about him. Almost comically so. Judging by the conversations she’s had with them, the three other leaders on the Nexus think he’s arrogant and incompetent. But Lana knows he’s much worse than that. She knows his type. Dealt with his type before. Not on Omega but Illium and that, truthfully, is scarier. But she files it away in the back of her brain. It probably won’t ever matter; won’t ever come to any kind of fruition she should care about. Because there’s a part of her, a big part even, that thinks they’ll soon be sitting starving at the top of these same stairs, watching the lights go out one by one.

Kesh nudges her gently on the arm before turning away back to her office. Kandros has already vanished. Lana tries not to look forlorn as she watches the Krogan go. Lana likes Kesh. Genuinely. Wants to, on her worst days, curl up under her desk and hide. Kesh disappears down the stairs, followed by an orderly. And then there were two. She can feel the tension rachet up in the recycled air. Lana doesn’t look back, keeps her eyes trained at the middle distance over operations.

“You’re practically a child.” Addison’s voice should probably be soothing, the kind of rich, honeyed British accent they used to use for VI voices back on Earth. But she always sounds slightly on the verge of hysterics, tinged with a vitriol that Lana knows comes from that deep well of insecurity the director of colonial development showed her during their first conversation.

Lana turns back to look at her. The Nexus flickers outside operations’ vast window. “I got you a colony.”

“One.”

“I made peace with the angara.”

“Barely.”

She’s got a point. Lana tries to hate her, she really does, but Addison’s surly, shitty attitude is frankly refreshing among a sea of people who seem to somehow, still believe, they’re going to pull through. But even through all of this, through every back breaking, nightmarish day in this new galaxy, Lana is still, unfortunately, herself. “You might want to change up your eyeshadow.” She says, with a quick cock of her head. “Not really your color.”

Addison makes a disgusted noise in her throat. “Thank you for proving my point.”

Lana has been standing at the base of the stairs for the better part of half and hour, trying to figure out the best way to go about this. The best ratio of planning and impulse. Aria taught her that, tried to at least. There had been a time, however brief, when something approaching warmth existed between the two of them. Lana reaches up again, her fingers finding the circular scar behind her ear. She’s never been good at learning lessons. She tries hard now to remember the ones she’d failed at.

Kandros is her first target, but not her primary one. That’s the asari at the far end of the long courtyard behind Addison’s office. Brecka mentioned her off-hand as he’d work to busily stonewall Lana as she’d tried to rifle through the Nexus’ personnel files _There are other people who can help you with this who don’t report directly to Director Addison._ He didn’t intend it to be helpful, intended it, she knew, to be a barely polite _please get the fuck out of my office,_ but she’d taken the advice, nonetheless. And has been trying to figure out her best vector of approach. Decides, as a few maintenance personnel hurry past her, that now is as any good as any other and heads out into the airy room.

Lana glances over to the far end of the courtyard, makes sure that she’s in the eyeline of the asari behind the personnel information desk, then slips into the militia office. “Kandros.” He starts like she’s pulled a gun on him. Lana glances again behind her, catches the asari behind the desk looking. She’d seen her chatting Kandros up earlier. That’s why she’s here. “Hey.”

He falls easily into parade rest, hands clasped behind his back. “Pathfinder.”

“Please,” she smiles, cocking her head so her dark hair falls over her shoulder. That first month on Omega, before Aria, her best customer had been a turian. A gruff, battle-worn ex-general who’d fled Palaven after a court-martial for war crimes on Shanxi. He used to wind his talons through her hair, credits pinging in her ears as she leaned toward him. “Call me Lana.” Kandros’ mandibles flutter, eyes tracing the line of her hair. He makes to take a step back then seems to shore himself up and decides instead to stand his ground. Lana leans against his console, the info feed casting a blue, flickering glow over both their faces.

Flirting with Kandros is easy because Lana can tell it’s the singular part of himself that he hasn’t worked to shore up. Turians are always caught off-guard by human coyness. Kandros especially. He exudes toughness, competence, and the livid scars all across his carapace are proof that it isn’t an act. But he’s fresh off Palaven so to speak, her turian on Omega had been too, and the flirtatious jokes and light sarcasm she’s plying seem to fluster him. Normally, Lana might find this cute, a little invigorating. But here, under the Nexus’ harsh fluorescence, the whole ordeal is starting to become a little grating. There’s something really shitty about the people on the Nexus. How cheery they all are, regurgitating the same few slogans they’d been fed before cryo, tittering nervously whenever she passes. It’s made its way onto her ship too. She told a joke the other morning in the comm room that landed so hard Cora actually sighed. She can’t even remember what it was. Maybe something about the scourge or corpses or how she’s so desperate to get laid that the kett are starting to look really appealing. _You shouldn’t joke about things like that,_ Kallo scolded before turning his back, heading back to the bridge. Here, now, Lana can feel herself losing steam, can feel Kandros pulling physically away from her. He brings up his omnitool, scrolls through, still nodding. Lana feels like she’s drifting, that incredible loneliness rising up inside of her again, edging close to fear. She glances back at the asari; she tells Kandros goodbye.

The asari is an aquamarine color up close, almost green. And Lana can’t stop looking at it. One night, in the mess hall, Suvi mentioned that some of the asari are changing color in Andromeda, just slightly, just a shade. An effect of the cryo apparently, though the scientists aren’t entirely sure. Lana remembers tracing up her own arms, chilled by the notion that she could be, fundamentally, changed by this place. That her long sleep had rearranged some of her DNA, to be determined exactly what. “I’m only doing this because you're the pathfinder.” Lana starts, blinks herself back to reality. The asari narrows her eyes, then glances over at the militia office. “And because Kandros trusts you.” 

“I appreciate it.”

“We’re not supposed to dig through records like this. Tann’s orders.”

“I _appreciate_ it.”

The asari huffs. “So what did you say the name was?”

Lana swallows, glances around. They’d had a plan. Once the ark docked with the Nexus they were supposed to find each other. They were going to hightail it the fuck out of dodge. Spread the ashes of his wife amongst these new stars. Then they would say goodbye, wipe clean their slates. Forget Omega, forget Aria. “Ricardo Hernandez.” She swallows again. “Goes by Ricky…not that…I don’t know what the records would show.”

The asari clicks her tongue against her teeth, typing away at her console. “Might help if you had more specifics.” She glances up. “There are _hundreds of thousands_ of people in our system.” 

Lana hesitates, tries to figure out how to even begin. “Mid-forties. I don’t know what his work designation would be.” She clears her throat. “He came over on the nexus. Maybe a mechanic? He’s got a scar on his face. It’s a burn. It’s, um,” She wavers and suddenly all she can smell is burning flesh, the metallic scent of blood, the whir of machinery and – the robot in her head twitches. Her heart is racing, she can feel it at the base of her jaw. She takes a long, ragged inhale to try and slow it down. “He has a scar on his face and neck. It’s distinctive.”

“We don’t have physical descriptions in the system.”

Lana frowns. “Did you look up his name?”

“I did. He’s not in our system.” Lana must have blanched because the asari quickly amends, “but a lot of records were destroyed during the mutiny.”

Lana purses her lips. She’s starting to feel clammy, a little unmoored. It’s starting to feel like the whole Nexus is tipping. She reaches out to put her palm flat against the desk, its steady. She takes a deep breath and shores herself up. It’s possible that Ricky joined up with the exiles, even probable, but… “He has a daughter.” Just saying the word out loud feels like a sharp, sudden betrayal. “Mallene. An asari. She’s 10, just a baby.”

The asari raises one eyebrow, then hunches over again to type at the terminal. “The only asari I can see in our system that young are in family units.” Lana gulps. “It doesn’t mean they aren’t here. Or weren’t here. Just that their records were likely destroyed during the mutiny, like I said.” She stands, hands crossed over her chest. “I’m afraid that’s the best I can do for you.”

“Hey.” Lana nearly jumps out of her skin. But it’s only Liam. Hand on her shoulder. That casual nothing intimacy again. He squeezes it, something sparkling at the corner of his eyes. Maybe not so casual. Bright smile. As usual. Convincingly at ease, even if their increasingly frequent late-night conversations over beer have revealed a deep well of uneasiness inside of him. He bounces on his toes. Always just a little squirmy. The way birds are. Chirpy. It’s hard to imagine him as a cop. In any capacity. “So that joke.” He says and there’s a different tenor in his voice. She eyes him.

_Like a bullet leaves a gun._ She can’t remember if he was a mechanic or some kind of scientist but when he’d said it, his voice echoing off the prefab’s metal walls, it echoed through her brain like shrapnel. Stayed with her on the suddenly endless walk through Eos’ dusty hellscape back to the Tempest. Stays with her still and as Liam flips her onto her back, the worn fabric of his shitty couch scratchy against her bare skin, his hands fumbling clumsily with the button of her jeans, she feels it inside of her. _Like a bullet leaves a gun._ Never to return, is what he’d meant to say. _You can never go home,_ is what she'd understood. 

As Liam tosses his belt aside, slips his pants down his hip, Lana imagines herself being propelled forward, destination somehow familiar, just within reach but hazy about the edges. Liam’s a little rougher than she expects, devoid of finesse. She should have guessed, though. He prefers shoguns.

But there’s something else too. A desperation that she can almost taste. They’re drenched in horrible things these days. So many horrible things. Echoes of them, generations of them, slick on their bodies. Nightmares that stretch across galaxies. That’s why they’re fucking. Lana knows that. To work this horrible shit out of their bodies. To get close to death, close to fear, bump up right against it, and then retreat. Or maybe that’s just her. Maybe she is, as Aria always used to say, catastrophizing. But she can’t help herself. Liam is moaning in her ear and it sounds, faintly, like the way that angara died on Veold. The ai choking the life from him, his death reflected on the smooth ice all around them. He became something else there; left the shell of himself behind. Lana feels sometimes like a shell. Like parts and pieces put barely back together. Liam finishes before she can even clock that he’s started, a wet line of his cum strung along her inner thigh. Each member of the pathfinder team was fitted with a birth control implant, their blood taken, abnormalities like std’s remedied. It still rankles her that he didn’t ask. Seems so at odds with his almost pandering personality and speaks, startlingly, to his inexperience. So when he pushes her back and tries to work her up with his fingers, a faint nausea settles in her guts and all she can think to do is throw her head back and writhe. “God Liam,” she says and her voice is so high pitched it almost scares her. He slows down when she says she’s about to cum and revulsion courses through her as she pretends to. She feels stripped down, ripped open, a kind of painful vulnerability she hasn’t felt in a long time. Lana stands when he pulls his fingers out of her, yanking her jeans quickly back up her legs. The robot in her head squirms uncomfortably in her brain and for once, she can’t really blame it.

Liam is basking in his afterglow on the couch and Lana knows as she leaves the storeroom that this is it. No more quiet beers side by side, no more flirtatious banter over the mess sink at breakfast. She feels it just as strongly as he doesn’t. It should not feel like a loss. The ship is so small. It feels like grief. _Are you alright, Pathfinder?_ The robot is whispering, knows that she doesn’t like when it talks inside her head, cautious not to draw attention as she walks. “Um, yeah. I’m…I’m fine.” _I’m glad, Pathfinder._ Lana slows her clip, narrows her eyes. There’s an inflection to its voice that it didn’t have before. Or maybe one that she just didn’t notice. She bites back the urge to thank it.

“Must be better ways to work off steam.”

Lana jumps. For a turian, Vetra is frighteningly quiet on the approach. “ _Jesus._ ”

Lana isn’t sure turians can smirk, but Vetra is doing her best approximation. “I certainly hope it was as good as it sounded.”

“Fuck off.” But Vetra is following her down toward the hallway, a bottle of wine in one hand and a flask of horosk in the other. They’ve been doing this lately, though Lana can’t remember who started it. Or when.

They slip quietly past the medbay, both of them keenly aware of Dr. T’Perro’s almost supernatural hearing and her vocal disdain for booze, and slip into Lana’s quarters. They take a seat beside the bed, looking out at the eerie glow of the stars as the ship coasts through darkness.

Lana didn’t know Vetra before Andromeda, but they know people who know people, the dense connections of the Milky Way’s underworld tying them inextricably together. It makes things easier. There’s a shorthand to the way they talk that feels, always, like a relief. “So Liam, huh?”

Lana twists the cap off the bottle of wine with her teeth. “I don’t wanna talk about it.” 

Vetra’s mandibles flutter as she takes a long pull of the horosk. Its pungent smell wafts over to Lana. She scrunches up her face. “Can’t blame you for that.” Lana scoffs. “You check your email?”

Lana takes a swig of the wine. It’s red. A vinegary edge that makes her think the bottle’s been open for a long time. “Jesus, what are you Suvi now?”

Vetra’s subvocals trill in a way Lana knows is laughter. “Drack said over dinner that he sent you something.” Lana raises an eyebrow. “About Kadara.”

“The exile colony?”

“That’s the one.”

“Huh.”

“Might be worth checking out.” The scourge blinks in Lana's peripheries. A pulse of light, then dead darkness. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading <3.


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